INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
How can you be sure an image wasn&t Photoshopped Make sure it was shot with Truepic
This startup makes a camera feature that shoots photos and adds a watermark URL leading to a copy of the image it saves, so viewers can
compare them to ensure the version they&re seeing hasn&t been altered.
Now Truepic technology is getting its most important deployment yet
as one way Reddit will verify that Ask Me Anything QAs are being conducted live by the actual person advertised — oftentimes a celebrity
[Update: Though to be clear, there no Reddit -wide or corporate partnership here
Reddit independent R/iAMA subreddit moderators have opted to suggest people use Truepic.]
But beyond its utility for verifying AMAs,
dating profiles and peer-to-peer e-commerce listings, Truepic is tackling its biggest challenge yet: identifying artificial
intelligence-generated Deepfakes
These are where AI convincingly replaces the face of a person in a video with someone else&s
Right now the technology is being used to create fake pornography combining an adult film star body with an innocent celebrity face without
But the big concern is that it could be used to impersonate politicians and make them appear to say or do things they haven&t.
The need for
ways to weed out Deepfakes has attracted a new $8 million round for Truepic
The cash comes from untraditional startup investors, including Dowling Capital Partners, former Thomson Financial (which become Reuters) CEO
Jeffrey Parker, Harvard Business school professor William Sahlman and more
The Series A brings Truepic to $10.5 million in funding.
Truepic fights photo fraud on apps like Tinder and Airbnb
&We startedTruepiclong
before manipulated images impacted democratic elections across the globe, digital evidence of atrocities and human rights abuses were
regularly undermined, or online identities were fabricated to advance political agendas — but now we fully recognize its impact on
society,& says Truepic founder and COO Craig Stack
&The world needs theTruepictechnology to help right the wrongs that have been created by the abuse of digital imagery.&
Here how Truepic
works:
Snap a photo in Truepic iOS and Android app, or an app that paid to embed its SDK in their own app
Truepic verifies the image hasn&t
been altered already, and watermarks it with a time stamp, geocode, URL and other metadata
Truepic secure servers store a version of the
photo, assigned with a six-digit code and its URL, plus a spot on an immutable blockchain
Users can post their Truepic in apps to prove
they&re not catfishing someone on a dating site, selling something broken on an e-commerce site, or elsewhere
Viewers can visit the URL
watermarked onto the photo to compare it to the vault-saved version to ensure it hasn&t been modified after the fact
For example, the r/iAMA
Wiki recommends that AMA creators use the Truepic app to snap a photo of them holding a handwritten sign with their name and the date on it
&Truepic technology allows us to quickly and safely verify theidentity and claims for some of our most eccentric guests,& says Reddit AMA
moderator and Lynch LLP intellectual property attorney Brian Lynch
&Truepicis a perfect tool for theever-evolving geography of privacy laws and social constructs across the internet.&
The abuses of image
manipulation are evolving, too
Deepfakes could embarrass celebrities… or start a war
&We will be investing in offline image andvideo analysis and already have identifiedsome subtle forensic techniques wecan use to detect
forgeries like deepfakes,& Truepic CEO Jeff McGregor tells me
&In particular, one can analyzehair, ears, reflectivity of eyes and other details that arenearly impossibleto render true-to-life across the
thousands of frames of a typicalvideo.Identifying even a few frames that are fake is enough to declare a video fake.&
This will always be a
cat and mouse game, but from newsrooms to video platforms, Truepic technology could keep content creators honest
The startup has also begun partnering with NGOs like the Syrian American Medical Society to help it deliver verified documentation of
atrocities in the country conflict zone
The Human Rights Foundation also trained humanitarian leaders on how to use Truepic at the 2018 Freedom Forum in Oslo.
Throwing shade at
Facebook, McGregor concludes that &The internet has quickly become a dumpster fire of disinformation
Fraudsters have taken full advantage of unsuspecting consumers and social platforms facilitate the swift spread of false narratives, leaving
over 3.2 billion people on the internet to make self-determinations over what trustworthy vs
fake online… we intend to fix that by bringing a layer of trust back to the internet.&
